The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Variations in the appearance of a tracked object, such as changes in geometry, photometry, camera viewpoint, illumination, or partial occlusion, pose a major challenge to object tracking. The object tracking devices developed thus far can primarily be classified into two categories: short-term tracking devices and long-term tracking devices, respectively.
Short-term tracking devices are based on a short-term memory model and employ techniques such as incremental learning of a low-dimensional subspace of the target representation and sparse representation of tracking. The short-term memory of the target appearance is modelled using a small set of target instances and discriminative techniques that consider both background and foreground information. Short-term tracking devices depend on spatiotemporal consistency of visual clues and tend to be inefficient in complex object tracking applications.
In contrast, long-term tracking devices employ a long-term memory model and can be differentiated based on their choice of appearance models and inference algorithms. A long term object tracker such as the tracking-learning and detection (TLD) tracker employs two experts to identify the false negatives and false positives in order to train the detector. Additionally, some long term trackers model target appearances using oversampled local features, whereas other long term trackers are based on self-paced learning schemes in which the target appearance is learned by selecting trustworthy frames. A drawback of the above long term trackers is that they update the appearance model in a rather conservative manner and are thus not able to handle fast appearance changes that occur in a short time period.
Accordingly, there is a requirement for an object tracking device that addresses the above stated drawbacks of object trackers and boosts tracking performance.